Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Laugh It Up...

I "get" it, sure - fanboys can be some of the most obnoxious, entitled dipshits on the planet; the ongoing nonsense over "Mass Effect" demonstrates as much. But in this particular case I'm not convinced its a good idea to dissmiss the supposed "red flags" being raised out of hand as just another "OH NOES MAH NOSTALGIAZ!!!1!" thing. "Fanboys" can be the canary-in-the-coalmine of pre-production under certain circumstances, and there's more than enough precedent this time: EVERYONE poo-poo'd and snarked when "Transformers" fanboys flipped their collective shit over the early glimpses at what Bay was doing to THAT property; after all... but Chicken Little was RIGHT - "Bayformers" really WAS one of the most noxious, poisonous, anticinematic, artistically-destructive things ever to infect the popular culture...

...and those "whiny fanboys" WARNED. US. IT. WAS. GOING. TO. HAPPEN.

Maybe we oughtn't be THIS quick to laugh it off, is all I'm positing, given the track-record of those involved. I'd also offer that its weirdly-incongruous to be doing so the same week that we're all bending over backwards to smile and nod about treating "The Hunger Games" arriving in movie-form like the second-coming (its not, that's all you'll get out of me for now) because we're all relieved that "fangirls" are psyched for something that isn't "Twilight." Just sayin...

41 comments:

It's all a matter of credibility Bob, I'm sorry to say. I'm going to ignore, for the moment that TMNT is in the same boat as He-Man (IE, I can't bring myself to care how good or bad the movie is given that the original product was not very good to begin with) and point out that you actually hit the nail on the head.

Yes fanboys can be the 'canary in the coal mine' of certain things; Transformers, Green Lantern, X3, Fantastic 4. But cultural memory is short and people remember what's happening now most clearly.

And right now, the largest and most vocal example of fanboys is listening to them whine about the ending of Mass Effect 3 (up to them trying to FILE AN FTC COMPLAINT BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T LIKE THE ENDING!)

That level of whining is likely to drown out ANYTHING they could contribute in the 'trying to stop BayTurtles' arena. It's impossibly easy to dismiss the concerns of someone who is whining about Bay in the same breath as whining about Mass Effect 3 (or similar). Once the ME3 shit dies down, people will pay more attention to BayTurtles. Until then, sorry that's just the way it goes.

I...honestly can't figure that out. Is it to make it more believable? Less silly? I can't see how that's possible. Maybe in Michael Bay's world that works better, but aliens is just as ridiculous an origin as a smattering of ooze spilling on four baby turtles. Could it be because he thinks aliens are cooler? I don't know.

But when you make their origin outer space, then there's so much more that's lost.

I do find it a bit amusing, however, considering how out-there the comics (both the original and those published by Archie) had gotten in terms of Sci-Fi. Maybe it's because of my familiarity with the comics that aliens doesn't really seem as much of an affront.

But it's unnecessary. It doesn't improve upon the property in any way, and in fact means it's going to be completely different from the original Ninja Turtles.

Why would you change something everyone loved? Did kids somehow grow out of it? My niece loves the ninja turtles. I thought the new TMNT film was pretty good, especially in terms of a kid's movie that doesn't treat the audience like idiots. Sure, there were cheesy dumb jokes, but it fell somewhere between the first and second movies in that regard.

Did the film do badly enough to justify this, though? And I thought either Eastman or Laird (cannot recall which) was being more careful with the rights to the property to avoid this sort of thing from happening?

He's working with one of the original creators to "build a richer world".

I'm...egh. I'll wait and see. When I first heard "Prequel to Alien exploring the Space Jockey", I thought "AAARGH WHY?!". Now the previews for Prometheus have me more excited for a movie than in years, more excited than District 9 and Scott Pilgrim had me excited combined.

While Ridley Scott is a much more competent (MUCH, MUCH more competent) film maker than Bay, maybe it is worth playing the wait-and-see game.

Bob, that post you made sometime ago where you linked that online fan short with the declaration that Bay's movie will not be better than it has been pretty much been confirmed to be case with more and more news coming from Bay's production.

Seriously, how sad is it that people with little to no resources can create something that understands the source material better than Hollywood producers with all of the resources at their fingertips?

Didn't like the fact that the fan short used shaky cam but I did enjoy that it felt dark and gritty like the ORIGINAL comic books. Another plus, it had a real turtle suit like the live action movies (the Jim Henson suits and effects work STILL hold up today). Anyone here actually think that Bay's movies are going to have the turtles be totally CG? I shake in fear just imagining it.

So, I'm not one to defend the Bayformer movies... but despite fanboy's being upset with it, everyone still went to watch it, it made a ton of money, and they made two more, each making more than the last...

Kinda hard for studios to agree with fanboy's over the guy who has made them billions in revenue.

The problem here is what fans like and what the general public likes are two different things. Michael Bay seems to have some special insight into what Joe and Jane Whitebread want to see on the screen and manages to give them exactly that in spades. He is a fucking genius even if everything he does violates every last thing a useless degree from film school ever taught anyone. What that says about the general public is up to you to decide.

I'm not saying it's a choice between only a faithful bomb and a raped blockbuster; just that Michael Bay operates on a plane of existence beyond the understanding of mere mortals and somehow manages to get box office results equaled only by George Lucas and James Cameron. It's almost Lovecraftian, actually; to truly understand Michael Bay means going completely mad.

Also, the original movies aren't really a good comparison because they came out during a weird era of popular culture that celebrated cornball fluff. This is not to say Michael Bay arbitrarily changing them to aliens does anything but piss off the fans, but again, he's clearly successful in spite of himself.

yes, the ME3 stuff is indeed a bunch of petulant bullshit. And I thought Evangelion's wackshit ending caused some tantrums. Sure, I thought it was bad too but under no circumstance would I demand my money back over something that comprised 20 minutes of an 80+ hour saga.

Anyway, I do find it hilarious how Bay decides that alien turtles are somehow less silly than mutant turtles. And I wouldn't be surprised if "working with one of the creator's" amounts to merely calling him once every three months to say "yup, we're doing what we want. Take your tears elsewhere." I'm just waiting for that beloved pet project of his to flop

Nonsense over Mass Effect 3? I can understand as an outsider how irrelevant things can seem, and I will admit some fans are taking it wayyyy too far. But don't be so ignorant about a matter just because you have no interest in it....}=/

Franchises get rebooted to give a fresh start for a new generation without missing out on a bunch of backstory.These new Ninja Turtles are not for you, its a childrens movie made for children. Grow up and deal with it.

I'm not really that angry about the change, more because of what it implicates. That Bay doesn't give a shit about the material and won't hesitate to change every single thing about it for the worse.

Anon 6:39Were it any other filmmaker, I'd bet this wouldn't be THAT big of a deal. If this were being handled by a competent director, the general outlook towards it would mostly be timid skepticism. But this is Bay and the guys at Platinum Dunes. Dunes have done absolutely nothing but shit and just about the only thing worth watching in Bays entire Filmography came out in 1996.

Just because its a reboot geared towards a younger audience doesn't excuse it sucking and THATS what most sensible fans are worried about.

@HyrabethianC'mon, lets be honest. Its nonsense.

I'm a HUGE Mass Effect fan and I was incredibly disappointed by the ending I received. I think it felt rushed, unoriginal, unfulfilling, and just a tad too ambiguous. But I can't by any means truthfully say that I deserve a better ending or that Bioware owes me something. Its their story, no matter which way you look at it, they decide how to end it.

I would actually be fairly pissed of if they do give into the outcry and change it.If they patch it, it would bring into question any and all key plot points of any of their games. Who's to say they won't release another patch that invalidates the ending again after a second fan whinefest or perhaps invalidates my character's romance with Tali or my characters friendship with Garrus. It lessens the impact of everything in the game.

SPOILERISH ALERT (I MEAN NOT THE ENDING JUST AN AWESOME SCENE)

Besides, My Mass Effect experience paid off with Shepard and Tali sharing the view of Rannoch together. Thats about all the closure I needed.

I guess I'm a lone dissenter, because I'll openly admit to liking some of Bay's movies...even Transformers (though I'll give you that 2 was horrible). And for the record, Bob, my driving record is spotless and I voted for Obama.

But I honestly don't get the level of hatred this guy engenders. Maybe it's because I truly don't care about Transformers or TMNT. But even if I did, I don't think I could even get that worked-up about it considering how those properties have been handled before in their long and storied histories.

And frankly, at this point I'm ready just to see the TMNT movie to spite the nerd/geek community, because the level of behavior seen in this and other forums disgusts me even more than anything Bay could do. I'm sorry, but the nerds really are acting like a bunch of whiny 5-year-olds - both about this and ME3's ending (and I toallt agreed w/ Ken Levine's statemnt on that).

I don't like how hollywood handled stuf from my childhood either, like Land of the Lost, the Grinch, Underdog or Candyland (although I think Battleship looks like it'll be cool). But I don't get apoplectic and throw a tantrum like others have been doing about this. I realize that this is how Hollywood is and always has been and will never change. And the sooner everyone else realizes this, we'll all be better off.

But if hating on Michael Bay is now a requirement of being a nerd/geek, then I no longer want to be part of it. I'll just be a guy who happens to like Sci-Fi, comics and video games and who alos likes the Star Wars prequels, Crystal Skull and the occasional Bay movie. Thank you.

I bet he's making them "aliens" instead of "mutants" becasue...lets face it. Mutants were really a popular word to throw around in the 80s and 90s, today someone may actually believe the term "mutant" to be non-PC. But thanks to Avatar, aliens are sheik now. Whatever, if they use this as an excuse to work in Krang as the villain for once I'd be on board...but then how do you explain Splinter?! Oh what am I kidding we're all gonna hate ever visual redesign they do. I guarantee if Casey Jones is in it they'll have him wearing nothing but TapOut merch and being a hardcore MMA fan!

@Lord SlithorThis isn't just a geek thing, huge amounts of people are livid. I was listening to radio today the presenter brought up the news and flipped her shit, and I'm just going to take a guess and say she's not a "nerd".

There's nothing wrong with a fun movie now and then. It's when the movie takes itself too seriously when it shouldn't, and it just ends up looking stupid, not to mention the unneccesary plotlines of the ensufferable human characters, or just the fact that it in general panders to teenagers by dumbing everything down so that it's just poop jokes and explosions.

If you want something fun that dosen't take itself too seriously, knows what it is and has fun with itself: I give you the Crank movies.

Also, if you want a to watch giant robots fight, but minus the shit human characters and plot and replace them with the exact opposite of those two, look no further than GURREN LAGANN.

PS, If I could ask, how were you able to connect to the characters in the Star Wars prequels, if at all?

@Daniel RI find the "it's their story" to be a little besides the point when this kind of thing arises, because it seems like a way to try to put down criticism of a creative work without going through the effort of actually responding to the criticism. Of course its "their" story in the sense that they own the IP and the sole right to expand the universe, alter the canon, etc. But it does not mean it's "their" story in some great moral sense.

In video games, perhaps more than any other currently existing medium, the audience plays a critical role in the shaping of a narrative, and this is nowhere mroe apparent than in RPG's like Mass Effect 3. The audience make the decisions, The audience gets through the combat sections however they can, the audience determines how your relationships will play out, the audience determines how much work they will do to get the "best ending". Of course, the audience will have to work within the framework provided by the developer, but this makes them, admittedly not in a legal sense, co-creators of the audience experience. The ending we got in ME3 was in line neither with the core themes, engagement and plot of the game (i.e. the reason we shelled out $60 to experience the game in the first place), nor with the public statements the developers made when interacting with their fan base.

So of course the audience is extremely unsatisfied with the ending it received. No, of course it does not "deserve", nor do we think we "deserve", a new ending, even though many of the fan's detractors say without bothering to read their arguments that they want some "tailor made" ending made to their specifications. That would be ridiculous. However, by a similar token Bioware and EA do not "deserve" to have their lousy ending go free from criticism, even if some of it is histrionic or a few individuals say things which actually are ridiculous. It is the audience's right to speak out and voice their opinion, especially in an interactive medium.

Even in a non-interactive medium like film, doesn't this very topic hinge on the idea of Fans complaining about the actions (or perceived future actions) that hack producer Bay is inflicting on TMNT, even though, as a representative of the IP holder, it is in a sense "his" story, and he is free to do what he likes with it?

20 posts without any comment on The Hunger Games? Well, Bob, I have some copyright- and credit-free fodder for your upcoming review!

The whole "Hunger Games is the next Harry Potter!" meme is part of a completely bullshit astroturfing campaign. Yeah, I know, huge shock with the saturation of viral marketing, but this goes above and beyond even the worst marketing excess.

To illustrate, let me ask you: have you ever heard of a book series called Maximum Ride? It's a mediocre at best James Patterson young adult series about genetically engineered human-bird hybrids on the run from a mega-corporation. By early 2008, it had sold 4.8 million copies across three books. Have you ever heard it described as the next Harry Potter? Or even within the same breath as Harry Potter?

Now, The Hunger Games has 2.9 million copies in print and sold over a million on Kindle. Pretty decent, right? Catching Fire has 750,000 in print and Mockingjay (which came out after Hollywood committed to the film series) had a 1.6 million first run. As far as Wikipedia numbers are concerned, that makes The Hunger Games trilogy only a little bit more popular than Maximum Ride (assuming nobody has been buying them since 2008).

Then you look at the numbers for Harry Potter and Twilight. 450 million for the former, 116 million for the latter. In what was is the 10 million at best selling Hunger Games even the slightest bit close to being some cultural juggernaut?

So no, this is not any more the "second coming for fangirls since Twilight" than, say, Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Please be awesome and bring this up in your review.

Do you realize how much money they've gathered for childsplay to show their frustration? It's completely peaceful counterart, and at it's core, it's just calling out a major mistake.

I mean, sure, there are people who phrase things out in an entitled manner, but that's also the case with the transformers, the turtles here, or even the star wars prequels and special editions. You don't look at the biggest whiners when it comes to those grievances and consider them to be repressentative of the fanbases, do you?

He has gone on record numerous times that Star Wars prequel bashing got tiring years ago and also that the value of Mr. Plinkett is that he teaches a lot of good filmmaking technique by using a movie series everybody has seen. That's not to say that there's definitely a dismissive jab at Mass Effect in this post, but Bob is very outspoken about his disapproval of "George Lucas raped my childhood" histrionics.

If the ooze is from space, and it somehow crashes to Earth and mutates regular Earth turtles, awesome!

However, the quote from when he announced it is this- “These turtles are from an alien race and they are going to be tough, edgy, funny, and completely lovable.”

So, how in the hell are they mutants? I am not a huge fan of the series, but by having it called "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles", it states right there that they are mutants. The show doesn't hold up at all(stiff animation, bad voice acting), the movies are okay, but nothing sacred, and the comics aged poorly. A new take could be cool, but not at the expense of what the title tells us we are watching. Mutant is in the title, so changing that means the title is null and void. Also, if we are to presume he handles this with as much care as he has shown other properties, than it really does seem like a $100 million "I hate geeks so I destroy their stuff" bullying tactic/

I am under the impression he isn't talking about those people, its the people at the level of going to the FTC to complain about false advertising because they took what is being said in an interview as advertising. For some reason BioWare has people that follow their games at a stalker level, for the outcry at Dragon Age 2 was worse for people were posting death threats because they felt slighted by the developer.

Ok Bob, I'll bite. What's so different about the complaints being made by Mass Effect fans the complaints made by Transformer fans.

Seriously! Is it once again because your bias? If it is that totally fine with me. There's tons of stuff I don't give a shit about. Kind of like the new Wii U which I'm sure you'll spend five months after release trying to defend its stupid name. :)

Man, now I wanna see a "I TOLD YOU BRO! I TOLD YOU ABOUT THE BAY!!" comic.@Atomic SkullThe awnser is simple, MONEY!Well okay there is more to it then that.In THE OFFICIAL TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES TREASURY from 1991 its "basicly" say that Kevin & Peter wanted to make a toyline but Playmates was like "not without a cartoon" so they hade one made and it was a HUGH hit and the rest is history.Its also tells they did a Usagi Yojimbo and a Panda Khan toy, they were buddys with creators of said comics and asked if they wanted to use a open slot they hade in the line up.And other dude like say Mondo Gecko were created at Mirage studios same as the TMNT:Adventure comic that was only published by Archie comic not made by them.Thats a common missconseption.Also there was plans for a MIGHTY MUTANIMALS but thats a diffrent story.

"Bob is very outspoken about his disapproval of "George Lucas raped my childhood" histrionics."But he's not calling people who partake in it whining dipshits though, is he?

That's what gets me. Yes, it's very close to being the same damn thing, but the Retake Mass Effect group is much, much more well behaved, and uses much more reasonable language and means to communicate their message...yet they're the dipshits, and the Episode 1 haters just need to calm down and take a chill pill.

"EVERYONE poo-poo'd and snarked when "Transformers" fanboys flipped their collective shit over the early glimpses at what Bay was doing to THAT property; after all... but Chicken Little was RIGHT - "Bayformers" really WAS one of the most noxious, poisonous, anticinematic, artistically-destructive things ever to infect the popular culture..."

Yet infect it, it did:

Current total sales from Bay's Transformers franchise: $3,229,236,294

So you - and all them fan boys - were three billion dollars of wrong. That's a lot of wrong.

"Bob is very outspoken about his disapproval of "George Lucas raped my childhood" histrionics."

That's because Bob is a hipster and that particular deal is considered 'played out'. I'm not making this up either, he said it himself that the only reason he bags on it is not because they're wrong, just that he's tired of hearing it. After all, it's not trending anymore.

See it for what it is folks: a fan-boy overreaching. Frankly I loooove it when he pulls this shit, cause it makes me smarter by comparison.

I thought Star Wars was supposed to be Space Opera. In that subgenre of Sci-Fi, usually the characters are supposed to be somewhat superficial and melodramatic. I didn't know I was supposed to really care all that much about them, as I'm used to thinking of them as being there to advance the story from one setpiece scene to another, or did I miss something?

At this point, though, I've become so disgusted with the bheavior of the nerd community on this that I'm considering breaking ranks and "joining the other side" on Bay's own forums. Despite what Bob says, the people there are far from douchebags, and they have a better sense of perspective on this whole thing.

And Bob, I'm sure you'd agree with me on this one, but wouldn't be nice if nerds could work up this level of outrage on some REAL issues? We've got those creeps Romney and Santorum running for office. Why can't they get that upset over the outrageous stuff THEY'VE said? What about the economy? Or Iran's sabre-rattling? Or Joseph Kony? There are real evils and problems in this world. But if nerds are determined to make Michael Bay the Devil, as they do on Topless Robot, hey go right on ahead. But they should be ashamed of themselves for acting like this.

Bob, you go on at length about the problems in this country and how stupid the general populace are, but nerds are not immune to this either. Seeing this and all the other nerdrage over the years has shown me they can be as petty and small-minded as those who picked on us in high school. If I so much as said I liked Bay's Transformers or the SW prequels, I'd get shouted down and be told, "NO! YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!" So way to go, America. Good to know your priorities are in order. :P

Oh, one other thing. I find it ironic that voice actor Robbie Rist, of all people, is the one from the '80s show who has expressed the most visible outrage. I find that ironic because he played the character of cousin Oliver on The Brady Bunch, and his character has become shorthand for "show killer."

But if nerds stopped complaining about stupid changes to artless franchise cash-ins and started complaining about the actual problems of the world, they'd stop being nerds and *gasp* start being normal responsible people. That just wouldn't fly.

...or we could assume there are different forums and threads for different topics and one can join as many as they want.

@Lord SlithorStar Wars was popular because it had compeling characters that people can identify with, the prequels don't have that. And again, Gurren Lagann (as well as Cowboy Bebop) are both Space Operas popular for their characters.

And Anakin's transition to the dark side was fucked. We rarely get to see him as a good person so graudual change isn't as meaningful. And laughing with Obi-Wan or saving him a couple times doesn't make them friends, they usually are saying stuff behind people's backs.

And back to Transformers, why should I have to sit through these meaningless human subplots in a movie about fighting robots. As Brad Jones (the Cinema Snob) said best, (paraphrase) "If you want to watch giant robots fight, you have to sit through a lot shit to get their."

Cowboy Bebop is about as far from space opera as possible without taking it out of space. The term is a lot more specific than "something set in space", usually boiling down to "Greek war epic IN SPACE". Don't know about Gurren Lagann, but Wikipedia's synopsis seems like it might fit.

On that topic, space opera, by definition, cannot have in-depth characterization. The focus of the stories are around massive, sweeping social change and the characters are supposed to represent abstract concepts of the human condition. While there is room to distinguish them at least a little, there is nothing that really, truly shows what's going on in, say, Luke Skywalker's head. He is everybody in the audience and as such, he is streamlined to only the traits that move the plot forward. This is not automatically a bad thing, but such a character only works in this kind of epic mythology. Try and imagine him being the center of a psychological thriller without adding a single new facet to his personality and you'll see what I mean.

The biggest problem with the prequels is not just that the characters are absolutely nobody, but also that George Lucas even made a direct prequel in the first place (these are always doomed to failure because the audience knows what has to happen in order for the original to happen, so there's exactly zero tension), dumped a metric fuckton of boring, pointless information on the audience with absolutely no style or pathos at all while creating tons of plot holes in the process, and cluttered the screen with too much visual noise to make up for poor cinematography. There is no social commentary, no thematic message, no myth; just dry, tedious exposition leading to a trilogy that needed none.

Wait, did I just hear you support fanboy reactions to as-yet unmade "Art" being potentially ruined? After failing to so much as acknowledge your own "Fanboys r retards" trolling over Mass Effect 3's ending? Which, according to their own misleading advertising (Oh my, maybe that'd be why someone went off the deep end and reported it to the people responsible for dealing with misleading advertising...) was going to be the kind of thing the fanbase thought they might like, and then gave them crappy, tacked on, clearly rushed out "product" ending to meet budget rather than the artistic ending they had planned? You sir, are a shambles. Before you are worthy of sitting in judgement over a group you claim some moral guardianship thereover, mayhaps knocking it off with the trolling, the black/white judgement, and the rampant hypocracy and learning a skill that'll surely show you to be some kind of godlike nerd: The art of apology.

So, you're in favour of Mass Effect keeping its ending that throws out the game's themes and idea of the player's choices all meaning something, but as soon as Michael Bay touches the TMNT, that's bad?

Dude, you're a total hypocrite. And the worst kind of hypocrite - the 'it's my fandom, so it's more important than yours' kind.

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About Me

Bob is a part-time independent filmmaker, part-time amateur film critic and full time Movie Geek. He is heterosexual, a pisces, and a severely lapsed Catholic. He is a tireless enemy of censorship, considers his personal politics "Libertine" and enjoys acting as a full time irritant to overly serious people of ALL political stripes.